Harvesters of various types, including various sugarcane harvesters, may include harvesting devices of various types. Harvesting devices for a sugarcane harvester, for example, may include assemblies for cutting, chopping, sorting, transporting, and otherwise gathering and processing sugarcane plants. In certain sugarcane harvesters, such harvesting devices may include base cutter assemblies, feed rollers, cutting drums, and so on. In various harvesters, harvesting devices may be hydraulically powered by an engine-driven (or other) pump.
To actively harvest crops, a harvester may move along a field with harvesting devices engaged, the harvesting devices gathering and processing material from rows of crop plants. In the case of sugarcane harvesters, gathered sugarcane stalks may be chopped into billets for delivery to a trailing wagon, while leaves and trash may be separated from the billets and ejected into the field.
After harvesting a given row (or rows) of plants, it may sometimes be necessary to reposition a harvester before harvesting a new row (or rows). In some cases, the harvesting devices of the harvester may remain activated during this repositioning. Harvesters may also travel relatively long distances between different fields, storage locations, maintenance locations, and so on, and, at various times, may idle in place or otherwise hold position. For example, a harvester engaged in active harvesting within a field may sometimes pause its harvesting in order to wait for an empty wagon to arrive.
Operators of harvesters may be generally motivated to maximize active harvesting time, viewing excessive maneuvering, traveling, and waiting as undesirable due to the lack of productive gathering of crop, increased wear on the harvester's systems, ongoing consumption of fuel, and so on. Accordingly, it may be useful to monitor harvesters as they operate, in order to track and record the time spent in various activities. Existing monitoring systems for this purpose, however, may provide relatively limited and imprecise information. For example, systems assessing only the state of a harvesting switch may be limited to identification of only two broad classes of harvester activities and may not accurately capture the amount of time actually spent on such activities.